WEB 2.0 TECHNOLOGY IN AN ART & DESIGN COLLEGE LIBRARY

Here is the final post for my emerging technologies blog regarding the use of Web 2.0 technologies in an art & design college library – The Fleet Library @ Rhode Island School of Design.

The Fleet Library @ RISD. Photo credits: http://library.risd.edu/

RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN

The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) was founded in 1877 in the city of Providence, Rhode Island as a premiere art and design college.  The college is a private institution, which includes higher education and art museum.  The school is made up of 2,200 students, 350 faculty and curators, and 400 staff members, and offers sixteen undergraduate and seventeen graduate majors (apparel design, art history, architecture, ceramics, digital media, film/animation/video, furniture design, glass, graphic design, industrial design, interior architecture, jewelry and metalsmithing, landscape architecture, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, art and design education, and textiles).

THE FLEET LIBRARY @ RISD

The original RISD library facility and collection, founded in 1878, began on a smaller scale and was located in a small section of a building on the college’s campus.  It is now a much larger collection and is one of the oldest independent art college libraries in the nation.  The growth of the collection took place over many years and eventually grew larger than any facility available.  So in the late 1990’s RISD campaigned for a larger facility and final location for its art and design collection.  In 2002, FleetBoston Financial Corporation gave RISD its former bank building, the FleetBoston Banking Building, located in downtown Providence and within the RISD campus.  After four years of construction, the library opened in October 2006 renamed The Fleet Library.  The Fleet collection holds over 115,000 volumes and 400 periodicals covering subject areas such as, architecture, art, design, & photography, and all collecting at an upper research level.  The collection also includes a noted artist’s book collection, a rare book collection, and a visual resources collection, and employs 23 full-time librarian staff, along with many student employees.

WEB 2.0 @ FLEET

The Fleet Library currently uses several forms of Web 2.0 technology to enhance its library services.  These technologies include blogs (through WordPress and Blogger), Twitter accounts, a wiki, a Facebook account, a Flickr account, and a Delicious account.  The major Web 2.0 technology Fleet uses is the blog.  Library staff has created three separate blogs, one is the RISD Reference Blog, another is the RISD Visual Resources Blog, and the final blog is the RISD Special Collections Blog.  All have been created fairly recently, except for the Reference Blog, which is two years old.

The reference blog is maintained by Fleet’s Readers’ Services Librarian, Claudia Covert.  The blog acts as a one-stop-shop for all frequently asked questions, it links to resources for common course assignments, provides assess to library research guides and bibliographies, etc.  The blog also acts as a way of alerting patrons to downed databases, broken printers or copiers, or other administrative issues happening in the library.  This blog offers the library the chance to create easily accessible information via an electronic format that previously was only paper based and hard to access.  The blog also acts as a reference log, archiving all reference questions, who answered the question, and when, and it allows for statistics tracking in a new more efficient way.  Covert has also created a Twitter account (risdlib) focused strictly on broken equipment and downed databases so patrons know even more immediately about issues of concern in case they cannot access the blog.

The RISD Visual Resources Blog is another blog the Fleet Library has developed dedicated to RISD’s Visual Resources (VR) and is maintained by the Visual Resources Librarian, Marta Bustillo.  The VR blog acts as another one-stop-shop for all things visual resource related at the Fleet.  It allows the library to update patrons of new and interesting materials in its collection, while also offering links to other resources of possible interest outside the Fleet Library.  The Visual Resources Blog offers helpful widgets that cover videos from museums or vodcast tutorial instruction, features new images from the VRC’s Flickr PhotoStream, and spotlights bookmarks from its Delicious account.  Like the RISD Reference Blog, the VR Blog is, for the first time, bringing together multiple resources through a single access point that are easy to access  and are using Web 2.0 technology to its fullest.

The Visual Resources also supports a Facebook account that features the RISD Library Picture Collection.  This account acts in a similar way as the VR Blog, but only focuses on one aspect of the visual resource collection, the picture collection.  The collection is made up of almost a quarter of a million printed images from popular culture and fine art dating back to the late 1800’s.  The VR has also developed a Flickr account that allows the VR librarians and faculty to work together more closely.  The VR provides faculty researching aboard a geo tagging memory stick for their digital cameras that allows them to tag their photos and then wirelessly access the VR Flickr account so they can upload their tagged research photos to Flickr any time they wish during their trips.  This helps VR librarians with cataloging by offering more manageable amounts to catalog and it gives faculty a way to back up their photos.  It also provides another important feature of allowing faculty to tag their photos, which adds accuracy to the cataloging process.

IMPACT OF & RESPONSE TO WEB 2.0

All the Fleet librarians interviewed, who are responsible for Web 2.0 technologies at the library, expressed the fact that these technologies were chosen because each helped solve problems with access and service that older formats can no longer be applied to.  They felt the technologies offered them a way to be proactive and meet patrons’ needs.  Bustillo mentioned the competition the library has with the studio and the importance for librarians to be creative and engage patrons in a way they are familiar with, like Web 2.0 technologies.  The librarians also recognized and stressed the need to be thoughtful in how these technologies are chosen and used.

The impact of these technologies on library services at the Fleet Library is a little hard to determine at this point because many of these technologies have only recently been added.  All were established as library resources within the past couple of months, except for the RISD Reference Blog, which is two years old.  Usage statistics have not been collected for a long enough period of time for quantitative results, but anecdotally the impact has been good.  These technologies are allowing resources to be delivered in a way that matches the patron audience.  And patrons are responding with enthusiasm over the resources offered and how well they work for information gathering.  (It is important to state that patrons of these technologies include students, faculty, staff, and alumni.)  Each librarian briefly did discuss the extra time it has taken to get these technologies up and going and their frustration with that experience. But, that was always offset by excitement over the technologies themselves and what they were offering patrons.

FUTURE WEB 2.0

All the librarians interviewed mentioned that the technologies currently being used would not be the end of exploration of Web 2.0 for the Fleet Library.  Each discussed technologies they had not previously used but were interested in using in the future.  Ellen Petraits, Evening Reference Librarian, would like to purchase Adobe Captivate in order to create interactive, online tutorials for instruction of staff and visual demos of artists’ books and exhibitions for patrons.  Covert discussed an interest in Google LibStats as an analytical way to look at and track reference stats.  It functions much like a blog, offering time, date stamp for reference questions and comments regarding the process, but combines that with analysis.  Covert also mentioned an interest in developing tutorial training for reference staff working weeknights and weekends so they could more easily find answers to IT questions, and that she would do this by using Web 2.0 technologies.  Bustillo mentioned an interest in using Web 2.0 technologies to help her and her student staff move away from email and other systems to track work calendars.  She discussed the use of Google Calendar and Google Groups to manage work schedules.  These technologies would allow staff to immediately communicate and share relevant information with one another beyond what the current system allows.

REFERENCES:

Marta Bustillo, Visual Resources Librarian, phone interview, June 11, 2009.
Claudia Covert, Readers’ Services Librarian, phone interview, June 10, 2009.
Ellen Petraits, Evening Reference Librarian, email interview, May , 2009.

Report on The Fleet Library, paper copy, (2006).

(*All web pages retrieved on 6/6/09)
The Fleet Library @ RISD web site, http://library.risd.edu/
The Fleet Library Reference Blog, http://risdlibrary.blogspot.com/.
The Fleet Library Visual Resources Blog, http://risdvr.wordpress.com/.
The Fleet Library Special Collections Blog, http://risdspecial.wordpress.com/.
The Fleet Library Reference Twitter account, (risdlib), http://twitter.com/risdlib.
The Fleet Library Visual Resources Picture Collection, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Providence-RI/RISD-Library-Picture-Collection/75072713942?ref=share#/pages/Providence-RI/RISD-Library-Picture-Collection/75072713942?v=info&viewas=0.
The Fleet Library VR Twitter account, (RISDVR), http://twitter.com/risdvr.
The Fleet Library VR Delicious account, http://delicious.com/risdvr.

MY BLOG EXPERIENCE!

This is one of my final posts regarding my emerging technologies course and I’ve got to say that I’ve really enjoyed using a blog for class. For my overall blog experience I feel like it has been interesting and has been fun. I was a little apprehensive at first to start a blog. I was a regular reader of blogs that others kept and felt they had a lot of merit and a lot to share. But, I didn’t think of my self as someone who had much to share through a blog. Plus, blogs seemed like a medium for others more technologically savvy, which I was not.

I chose to use WordPress for my blog. After using it for the past month, I feel like WordPress offers users a pretty easy format for creating and maintaining a blog. First of all, they have adopted an interface that is similar to other web 2.0 technologies, such as Facebook. WP has also arranged the page for creating new posts so it is similar to MicroSoft Word, with all the familiar formatting options and a familiar text window. Because of this, I felt like the site was easy to use, even for me as a first time blogger.

WordPress also allows its users to customize and personalize their blogs using optional themes and CSS programming, which is similar to some social networking sites. The widgets offered through WP were also nice. I felt like the widgets offered me the chance to do certain things that I was interested in doing and doing them easily, for example adding personalized backgrounds and fonts, pictures, blog stats, tag clouds, and links to the blogs of my classmates. I think that the options available through WP are probably pretty typical of most blog sites. Though they may not be what preferred by experienced bloggers or experienced techies, they were perfect for me (with my limited experience les choices may have been better). These are additional features of WP that I liked. I think that most of us are interested in personalizing our Web 2.0 technologies to suit and reflect us as much as possible. And I think it is one of the elements of Web 2.0 technologies that most attracts people to these types of technologies.

As for keeping a blog for a course, I really enjoyed it. I had never thought about what a blog could offer, but it’s been super helpful. At first I was stressed because I was trying to use the technology, i.e. figuring out how everything worked, combined with completing an assignment. But, the blog posts have been a great way to work through how I’ve approached certain Web 2.0 technologies, what I liked about certain technologies, and better understanding how others are using these technologies. Like Patrick, our instructor, has said, my blog will be a helpful reference of these Web 2.0 technologies in the future. And as I head into another semester of grad school in SLIS and then on to my career, these technologies will become more and more important.

Another aspect of using a blog for a course that I really liked was being able to read through the blogs of my classmates and see how they approached certain topics. I think that having this type of interaction with my classmates and their work added another level of depth to the learning experience for me. We posted on our blogs after every class meeting, writing about our experiences, and posted all of our papers on our blogs as well. Often my classmates talked about things that hadn’t occurred to me, or wrote about things I had experienced but didn’t know how to solve or deal with. Plus, I was able to browse their blogs and see what I liked about their blogs as a visitor. And, the visitor perspective would be hard to gain for me blogging on my own. By being able to read through others’ blogs I gained a lot more experience and knowledge I wouldn’t have gotten any other way. I wish that more classes required blogs regarding the course content. The blog format offers much more depth and flexibility I think, than things like course wikis or typed summaries do. As the creator of the blog you have access to that record for as long as you like, even after the course is thorough. For the future, maybe I’ll start a blog strictly covering my current courses!

ONLINE TUTORIALS & E-LEARNING

In our last class we discussed online tutorials created to instruct users, such as screen casts for library patrons explaining how to use a particular electronic resources. We explored what the technologies were behind these online tutorials, how these technologies work, and how to choose the appropriate technology for a particular tutorial.

A tutorial needs careful consideration before choosing a technology to represent the subject matter adequately. Some tutorials absolutely need the visual element, so a podcast wouldn’t be the appropriate delivery method. Others have less complicated information to share so a simpler delivery method would be fine, while another tutorial might require more options for fully coverage of the subject matter. Audience consideration is also very important. What is the technology level of the audience the tutorial is directed at; also is the tutorial being created specifically for an audience with special needs? All are important to consider.

For my online tutorial assignment I want to create a tutorial that explains how to use the bound, printed catalogs, from the reference section of the Indiana University Fine Arts Library, to access information regarding artists or art. Such libraries as the Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, and the Library of the Freer Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C, produced printed catalogs before the advent of the online catalog so their catalogs could be shared with other libraries. Each printed catalog collection features a complete copy of the library’s card catalog in the order it was arranged in the drawers. All printed catalogs are made up of many volumes and have a statement of use at the beginning of the first volume that explains how to use the resource. Like the card catalog though, many students currently studying fine arts or art history do not know how to use such a resource. But, in order to study fine arts and art history students are required to use these types of printed resources because of the lack of advancement in technology in the field.

I believe the best delivery method for a tutorial on how to use a printed catalog would be to use Adobe Captivate technology. This technology allows the tutorial to record multiple screens combined with audio and text explanations. I think this combination would work well because students want a quick reference they can go to any time/any where at their convenience that uses technology they are comfortable with. The tutorial can be posted on the library’s website for easy access. In most cases undergraduate students prefer to go online before approaching a librarian. Plus, students study at times of the day when librarians may not be available.  In addition, this technology can showcase the simply technology of the printed catalog better than video or a website.

To create the tutorial, pages from the printed catalog will be scanned, such as the statement of use and particular pages showing different parts of the catalog collection, for example. These can be opened and screen shots can be made of them highlighting important sections. Plus, a script in audio and text to provide explanation. In addition, a map, or even a photograph, of where the printed catalogs are located in the reference collection, and the location of the reference collection in the library, will be placed at the beginning of the tutorial for further explanation for students not familiar with the arrangement of the Fine Arts Library. The entire tutorial should only incorporate a handful of screen shots and only be around a minute in length. Keeping the tutorial uncluttered and simple, and remembering to skip the librarian speak, is the best option.

LINK TO MY MASHUP!

This URL points to the Mashup I created in SLIS S603. Take a look and enjoy!

http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~devansca/debbie_mashup.html

This assignment was really fun to do. I feel like I learned so much from completing this assignment. I also find it hard to believe that I now know how to do this! I do wish I knew a little more about html, though. There are a couple of things that I would like to do differently.

RSS FEED POSTING

Here is a RSS Feed that I created last week linking to my online resume:

http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~devansca/debbie.xml

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

In Thursday’s class we explored social bookmarking. I started the class exploring the social bookmarking website FAVES. Faves is a website that allows you to save, or bookmark, your favorite web pages, like you would on your personal computer. But this site provides access to a list of your saved favorites from any computer with internet access. It also adds a social aspect to bookmarking. You can share your favorite websites with others on the site and develop a list of “friends” who can follow your website faves if they so choose, and vice versa. The site boasts several members who are considered the top rated bookmarkers on Faves, with a majority of members following their bookmarks.

I set up an account with Faves, which was very simple, and then bookmarked six web pages I consider some of my favorites. I decided to bookmark pages I actually have bookmarked on my personal computer, which made the decision a little easier. Faves has the option of two widgets for members to add to their browser toolbar, Fave It! and Faves. Fave It! is a tool that allows Faves users to quickly choose a web page they’re currently viewing as a favorite without the hassle of going through their official Faves account. The Faves tool allows users to link to their Faves account directly from any location on the web. I loaded both widgets onto my toolbar and the Fave It! tool came in really handy since I found choosing favorites hard via the web interface. I’m sure that I would have figured it out after more exploration and use. But in the case of wanting to set up favorites immediately, the widget made it super easy!

The web pages I bookmarked were related to libraries, music, news, and books. I was able to add several tags to each of the pages as I chose them.  Another nice feature of Faves, though minor, is that after tagging a page or two, the site automatically tries to fill in tags for you. I can see this feature being a bit frustrating for some users, but I liked it due to the fact that my picks are all similar and related to one another. Plus, it helped me remember the previous tags I had used so I could duplicate.

Next, I wanted to see if other Faves users had chosen the same web pages as me for their favorites. I struggled with this one for a while and couldn’t find any of the sites I had bookmarked. Faves offers a search box for the site that allows you to search through three categories, your personal favorites, everyone’s favorites, and your friends’ favorites. I chose to search everyone’s favorites since I knew my favorites and had no friends up to this point. This search didn’t offer anything related to my pages. I also decided to search using the tags I had given my pages. The search box allows you to search tags by entering a special search. You still can chose to search everyone’s favorites, but you enter the search for the tag as, “tag:music” for pages tagged “music.” With this search I still received nothing related to the pages I had bookmarked. My assumption was that I must be “friends” with individual users to search and see what they were choosing as favorites and what tags they were using. But, I’m not sure this is accurate. If it is accurate, it would be a definite negative aspect of Faves for me, but at the same time the point of this site is SOCIAL bookmarking. So it makes sense!

I chose to compare my experience using Faves with two other social bookmarking sites, Delicious and Netvouz. Well, Delicious was awesome, in my opinion! I went to the Delicious site and found the search box. I searched the pages I had bookmarked in my Faves account and ALL of them came up as web pages that Delicious users bookmarked and all the pages were tagged with tags almost exactly like the ones I chose in Faves. Delicious also showed the results of my search in a format that made deciphering the results easier. In addition the results showed how many people bookmarked that particular web page, who bookmarked the particular results record you’re looking at, and shows all the tags they chose, which are hot linked to other pages with the same tag. Delicious also offers two tabs in its search results. One tab provides popular bookmarks, while the other tab lets you explore tags. This tab is interesting because it links you to a particular tag, say “art,” that users have used. It lets you see the most bookmarked pages with that tag, and the least bookmarked. Very Cool!

My Netvouz searches were a little less successful. I found that two of my six bookmarked pages were bookmarked by Netvouz users, but they were the more popular pages in my favorites (New York Times and Library Juice). My other pages were not found when searched in Netvouz. Those pages that had been bookmarked on Netvouz were bookmarked by fewer people than on Delicious, which made me think that not finding my pages bookmarked on Faves or Netvouz is possibly related to the number of users both sites have compared to Delicious. Delicious advertised itself as “the biggest collection of bookmarks in the universe.” So not finding my pages on the other sites just might be a result of a smaller pool of user bookmarking less pages.

With this social bookmarking exercise complete, I now know what Delicious is and am sold on it!

VIRTUAL REFERENCE

In yesterday’s class we talked about different forms of electronic communication used in virtual reference, and what the differences are between the face-to-face reference experience and the virtual reference experience. I’ve used email and instant messenger to ask reference questions as a library patron, but never worked at a reference desk to experience it from the librarian’s perspective.

Indiana University Libraries has a link on their main web page called Ask a Librarian. This link leads directly to a page with access to instant messager, email, a reference desk phone number, and reference desk hours, all linking to some kind of communication with a reference desk librarian.  I’ve used this link for reference questions, both through email and instant messenger.

We also discussed the components of virtual reference being AAA, Anytime, Anywhere, Answers, which I thought was a great way to think about the virtual experience compared to the traditional face-to-face. Several of the students in my class have had experience working at a reference desk and talked about the differences they saw between the two formats. Ben mentioned  that with the virtual reference question it’s easy to go ahead and do the work for the patron, such as find an article, instead of showing them the available resources and explaining how to use the resources to find an article. I thought this was a great point which I can see myself falling into and having to be aware of. These forms of communication are meant for quick responses, which make explanation and instruction difficult, and as Amanda brought up, are subject to a different set of etiquette.

The class divided into two groups and we took turns chatting in Yahoo Messenger, asking each other reference questions and practicing proper reference interview etiquette. This went smoothly since I had a little previous experience with Yahoo Messenger. Then we moved on to Zoho and Meebo, both are forms of electronic chatting software available on the web. I was in the Meebo group. It took a little more effort than I expected to get everything set up (thanks Kristina!), but once set up was complete it went well. Kristina, Heidi, and I chatted back and forth for a while. The Meebo interface was easy to use and can be used by anyone, no account necessary. I really like Meebo for this option because if someone wants to chat with you they log into your account as a guest and start chatting away. They don’t have to mess with creating an account if they don’t want to.

Next class (5/21/09), social bookmarking/networking! I’m hoping to find out more about this thing called delicious!

WEB-BASED RSS FEED READERS

The assignment for today’s session of SLIS S603, Emerging Technologies in Libraries, was to set up an account with a web-based RSS reader and use the reader to subscribe to five library/librarian related blogs.  I had several RSS feeders to choose from, but I decided to choose Bloglines (www.bloglines.com).  My decision was based on previous knowledge of Bloglines, being only familiarity with its user interface and the steps necessary to set up an account. The account set up was very simple and painless, taking only a couple of minutes.  One thing that I liked about the set up was that the site provided recommendations of possible blog topics that may be of interest.  I thought that step was a nice feature, especially for a beginner like my self. Plus, the topic of ‘Libraries’ was offered, which I didn’t expect to see on the list.

I felt like Bloglines was a fine choice as RSS readers go and is fairly easy to use.  I did find a site that allowed me to compare RSS readers and see a little bit more detail about each of them.  The site is from the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies in Somerset, England (http://c4lpt.co.uk/Directory/Tools/rss.html) and it offers a breakdown of the web-based RSS readers out there.  The Centre has created a directory providing a comparison of the online readers available, explaining cost associated with each, providing individual websites, and the particular tools each sites offers over another.  They of course cover Bloglines, but also Blogbridge, Google Reader, Feed Reader, just to name a few.  They also covered another, Net News Reader, which I found interesting because it is a web-based RSS reader that is especially for Mac users, but it came with a cost.   I found the site very helpful.

After setting up my account I ran into several problems.   I think all are related to my inexperience with reader sites and the whole blog/RSS feed thing in general.   I felt like I was fumbling around my account a lot!  I would subscribe to a blog feed in the editor interface and then that subscription would disappear once back in the basic account interface.  This also happened with a folder that I tried to create to better organize my RSS feeds.   This continued to happen and was frustrating, so I decided to wait and come back to it at a later date, with a fresher mind.   I think I’ll get better at the RSS feed thing after a little exploration of my account and exploration the tools Blogline offers.  These frustrations a side, I’m really excited about this new opportunity and having the chance to stay connected to other librarians!

As for my selected feed subscriptions I went a little crazy.   I ended up subscribing to ten RSS feeds from different library related blogs, Librarian in Black, Alternative Teen Services, The Shifted Librarian, The Travelin’ Librarian, Resource Shelf, and Art and Design School Library Blog, just to name a few.   I feel like these blogs are a good reflection of all the different aspects of librarianship I’m interested in.

My First Post!

I’ve created this blog as part of my Emerging Technologies in Libraries course and this is my first and only post to date. I do hope that it will be of more interest as the summer session progresses. Stay tuned!